WonderFi founder says Canadian crypto rules led to Robinhood deal

Canada built one of the toughest regulatory environments for crypto companies in the world. According to the founder of WonderFi Technologies, that’s exactly why his company is now owned by Robinhood. Karia Samaroo, who founded WonderFi in 2021 and served as its CEO, laid out the case in a recent op-ed: years of navigating Canada’s demanding and fragmented securities framework ultimately made a foreign acquisition the most viable path forward. Robinhood completed its purchase of WonderFi for C$250 million, roughly US$179 million, on June 1, 2026. From consolidator to consolidated WonderFi’s arc is a compressed history of Canadian crypto ambition. Samaroo built the platform by rolling up existing exchanges, consolidating operations from Bitbuy and Coinsquare into a single entity. The result was Canada’s largest crypto platform, with over 300,000 funded customers and more than C$2 billion in client assets under custody. That consolidation strategy was partly a response to the trust vacuum left by QuadrigaCX, the Canadian exchange whose founder died in 2019 with sole access to roughly $190 million in customer funds. After QuadrigaCX, and later the global fallout from FTX’s collapse, C...